Date published: 2006/03/20
The BBC says:
The first car-share lane to be built on a UK motorway has been given the go-ahead by the government.
The one-mile (1.6km) lane will open in 2007 at the junction of the M606 and M62 in West Yorkshire, Transport Secretary Alistair Darling announced.
It will allow cars carrying more than one person priority entry from the M606 southbound onto the eastbound M62.
A second such lane will open in 2008 on the M1 between junction 7, near Hemel Hempstead, and junction 10, in Luton.
That forms part of a planned widening scheme with work, which begun on Monday, expected to take about 32 months to complete.
Work on the lane in West Yorkshire is due to begin early next year.
The £2.5m lane, on the busy route between Bradford and Leeds, will cut rush-hour journeys by eight minutes on average.
Single-occupant vehicles would not suffer from additional delays and should also benefit from improved journey times, the Highways Agency said.
Mr Darling told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that car-share lanes had been used successfully in the US, Australia and Canada.
"I think it's one of a range of measures that we need to introduce because, frankly, in 20 or 30 years time we'll face absolute gridlock unless we're prepared to take sometimes difficult, sometimes unpopular decisions.
"But, to my mind, it's a sensible measure to try and encourage people where they can to share lifts, especially if they're going to work maybe in the same place or same area."
The government would also be looking into road pricing as another possible means of tackling congestion, he added.
Lane rules will be enforced by either cameras or extra police patrols, a Highways Agency spokesman said. Lone drivers found in the car share lane could face fines or penalty points.
Well it's probably worth giving the idea a try. But although Darling has been briefed by his advisors to claim it works wonderfully elsewhere in the world, the real question is whether enough people start sharing lifts to make the idea worthwhile. After all, this extra lane could instead be built to be used by everyone, and presumably the idea is that by restricting its use to multi-occupancy cars this will make the flow in this lane much less than that in the other lanes, hence it is an under-utilised resource, i.e. not value for money. And sharing lifts is not ideal for most people, who do specific-spacetime-point to specific-spacetime-point journeys, and one or other needs to be blurred to make it worthwhile. Indeed, the immediate beneficiaries of this kind of scheme are rich people (like Alistair Darling) who get driven around by someone, and non-working families (e.g. people on holiday) who now have extra incentive not to avoid the rush hour even though their time is more flexible than most workers. Unfortunately transport consultants have a vested interest in concocting more and more of these schemes, so their ideas are unlikely to be critiqued properly in government.
_________________________________________________________
All material not included from other sources is copyright cambridge2000.com.
For further information or questions email: info [at] cambridge2000 [dot] com
(replace "[at]" with "@" and "[dot]" with ".").